Re: [NTLK] Stuff It......why I now hate it

On Mar 22, 2007, at 8:38 PM, Dan wrote:
> I will mention that some .sit files have such forks others do not. I
> don't see any issue in decompressing a .sit file and compressing it
> with
> zip with all the same files so that these forks will be preserved. Or
> will that damage them in someway?

Nonono, don't mix them forks ;-)

First off, forks are deprecated and not used anymore in OS X. They
have been replaced by something called "Packages" (which is simply a
folder with the specific name extension ".app".

Buuuut, for all those stuck with OS pre-X, resource and data forks
are important. On a Mac, files have two forks that are very
independent. Resource forks used to define a lot of the inner
workings of applications, their signatures, icons, windows, widgets,
texts, etc. etc. . Data forks contained only the executable code.

The idea was great: you could write your entire app and put the user
interface into the resource fork. Now if you had to change your
application from English to German for example, no programming skills
were needed. Just take a resource fork editor (ResEdit for example)
and change all text, enlarge buttons to hold more text "Eingabe"
instead of "OK". Easy.

Unfortunately, instead of just defining a chunk system, Apple
reinvented the wheel and create a new file system from scratch that
supported these forks. All other file systems and all standard file
functions for programmers only see the data fork. So whenever you
copy a Mac file to a non-Mac machine, or archive with a non-Mac
program, your resource fork is lost, including all user interface
data, icon, creator dtata, etc. etc. . Buh-bye.

The .sit file itself was intentionally made roboust enough so that it
could lose *its* resource fork without losing any resources *inside*
the archive. In that respect, .sit was the only possible way to
transfer files on the Mac.

OS 10.0 to 10.3 had a horrible mix of functions forgetting forks and
other still needing them. Since 10.4 this is mostly sorted out.

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